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Lindsey Hall: Hi. I'm Lindsey Hall, Head of Thought Leadership at S&P Global Sustainable1.

Esther Whieldon: And I'm Esther Whieldon, a Senior Writer on the Sustainable1 Thought Leadership team.

Lindsey Hall: Welcome to ESG Insider, an S&P Global podcast, where Esther and I take you inside the environmental, social and governance issues that are shaping the rapidly evolving sustainability landscape.

Esther Whieldon: Last week, we brought you several episodes of the podcast from an event called CERAWeek that S&P Global host in Houston, Texas, each year. The Financial Times has described this week on conferences as the Davos of Energy. It's a big event. And for Lindsey and I, it was a chance to hear from a very different cohort that we normally encounter as sustainability focused events we cover. For example, we heard from CEOs from some of the world's largest oil and gas companies.

Lindsey Hall: Well, today, we're covering one big theme we heard throughout the week, and that's the need for innovation to develop new technologies that can facilitate the energy transition and contribute to decarbonization efforts. We also heard how people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives have a role to play in identifying and developing these needed technologies.

Esther Whieldon: So today, we're bringing you an episode looking at two women leaders in the emerging technology space. First up, let's turn to the CEO of a clean tech company that is applying its carbon recycling technology to make sustainable raw materials for everyday products.

Lindsey Hall: That's right. I sat down with LanzaTech CEO, Dr. Jennifer Holmgren, to talk about the technology her company uses and the outlook for innovation in the low carbon tech space. And as part of our ongoing Women in Leadership series of this podcast, I also asked Jennifer about her path to the CEO role, the challenges she faced along the way. And as you'll hear Esther, I really love her advice for others earlier in their careers. Okay. Here's Jennifer. She starts off by explaining what her company does.

Jennifer Holmgren: My name is Jennifer Holmgren. I'm the CEO of LanzaTech. I'm the Chairman of LanzaJet. What we do is we take waste carbon emissions, carbon that's already above ground, and we convert it to all the things we use in our everyday life.

So what we do is we, a biological company, we ferment gases. So we don't ferment sugar, we firment gases and the gases we ferment there are carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and hydrogen. So that means we can use industrial waste like at a steel mill. We can use solid ways like municipal solid waste if we turn it into a gas. And we can use biomass, waste biomass residues. And we can CO2. W  can recycle carbon from all of these resources and turn it into the things we need.

We have partnerships with H&M Move, with Lululemon, with Zara, companies that are actually taking our polyester made from a waste gas in China and converting it to things that they sell to the customer. And every time they recycle carbon from that steel mill into a dress that's one less carbon that has to come out of the ground.

Lindsey Hall: Okay. I don't think I even really understood that something from a steel mill could then have a use for a company like H&M, Zara in clothing. So that's pretty fascinating. What's the hurdle to it? Why is it not happening at more scale?

Jennifer Holmgren: Well, it's always economics, right? At the end of the day, we are more expensive polyester than fresh polyester made from fossil. And I think that's true for every new technology, right? This is what happened with solar.

You had to get it down the cost curve, which led to more implementation, which led to more build-out, which led to more going down the cost curve. The more you build, the cheaper it is. And so I think implementation is about getting cost competitive to an industry that's been around for 100 years, right?

And that's optimized itself as any good industry would do, right? And so what we're trying to do is compete with something that on a cost basis doesn't pan out. But you need the early movers, right? You need the people that are going to say, okay, I'm willing to pay more to help you build more, to reduce the cost? And okay, I'm only going to transition 10% of my polyester today with the goal that it will be 100% as you continue to get down the cost curve. It's those early movers that matter.

Lindsey Hall: Okay. And so the early movers, are those companies? Are they investors? Are they consumers? Like talk to me about where the action needs to happen.

Jennifer Holmgren: Yes, but they're all of the above, right? So the early movers are partners that provide a steel mill gas to us like ArcelorMittal, right, leader in the steel sector. The early movers are the end users, the Lululemons and the Zaras of the world. These come together to both create the product and to pull and create the demand.

But the other thing you need are the investors, right? We're a start-up company. Somebody had to buy the mission. They have to believe in what we were trying to do, and they had to say, well, this is completely different, but I'm going to take a chance on it because if I don't, it will never grow up.

And so we have the VC-type investors like Khosla Ventures. And we also have the infrastructure partners like Brookfield and Olayan and these are the people that help finance building these units and they're key to our success. So you actually need every part of the value chain to join you, right?

Lindsey Hall: Okay. So when you look at the space where you operate, what are the most exciting solutions or developments that you see happening, both here at CERAWeek, but then just more broadly, what's happening?

Jennifer Holmgren: I think the most interesting thing that I see is a real commitment to utilizing carbon dioxide as a fuel stock. How do you use it? Do you put it into a mineral? Do you reuse it into a pair of yoga pants? It doesn't matter to me how you reuse it. What matters to me is that you choose to reuse it and making concrete from it.

These things help reduce our carbon emissions. So I see a lot of interest in this from everybody, Oxy is one of our investors. They're reusing carbon. They've taken carbon out of the air. They're supporting companies that are doing very different things. And that's what's important. I don't think there's a single solution. There is no holy grail. And so what we need to support is the notion that somebody can use CO2. And everybody is going to contribute, every type of CO2 use is going to matter.

Lindsey Hall: For our listeners who are not intimately familiar with the space where you operate. Can you give us a plain English explanation of just what it means to reuse carbon. You listed some of the examples, but tell us like how does that even happen? And what are some of the use cases out there?

Jennifer Holmgren: Yes. So our case, I'm going to take a step back and actually go through exactly how our process works. So we have a bacteria that eats carbon, gaseous carbon, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

It turns it very efficiently into ethanol. So ethanol, everybody knows it is a blending component for gasoline, but that's not what we use it for. We use ethanol to make sustainable aviation fuel. So we launched LanzaJet because we can take ethanol and convert it into something that's a drop-in replacement for conventional aviation fuel. The other thing we can do with it is people know how to take ethanol to polyester. People convert ethanol to polyethylene.

People know how to convert ethanol to foam and so what we're doing is we're saying, okay, ethanol is an intermediate from which all of these products that are normally made from ethylene, the largest chemical used in the chemical industry to make everything you would normally use with ethylene, make with ethylene. So really, all we're doing is we're dropping ethanol in every production process where ethylene can be used, okay? I know that seems complicated, but it's not.

Lindsey Hall: Esther, I actually thought that was about as clear an explanation as I've ever heard. So we heard from Jennifer about the creative approach for company is taking to carbon capture and recycling. And she showed me a pair those yoga pant she described.

Esther Whieldon: Okay. I loved saying the picture you put up on LinkedIn of her holding up those yoga pants. Now Lindsey, what Jennifer said earlier about the challenges of the economics of new technologies was something that came up in my interview with Dr. Enass Abo-Hamed, who is another entrepreneur in the low-carbon energy technology space, and she's CEO and Co-Founder of H2GO Power. That company is working to help facilitate the safe storage of green hydrogen.

As a reminder, green hydrogen is created using renewables such as wind and solar to power electrolyzers that split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. H2GO also has an AI technology that helps determine the best times to produce and store green hydrogen. The AI program, for example, has been tapped to be used for a planned offshore wind and hydrogen generation projects that will be in the U.K. Here's Enass talking about how her company got started.

Enass Abo-Hamed: I did my PhD back in the days at Cambridge University in hydrogen storage because technically, it was a very interesting technical problem to solve. So this was the initial driver. If you add on top of that, I really think that the honest answer is naivety, not knowing what commercialization is, is a massive advantage when you have a lot of excitement around technology, especially if that technology solves a big problem.

So there was no market when I started the company, but I really believe that the market will come and will evolve because we simply continue to burn more carbon and put it up there. Looking backward at it, it did happen. So naivety was a great driver in this particular situation.

Esther Whieldon: Sometimes naivety combined with passion kind of gets it done.

Enass Abo-Hamed: Exactly. And I'm sure if you ask a lot of very successful entrepreneurs, what really like was the initial driver to tell you, like I had an idea, I was so excited about it, but also I did not know how that journey ahead looks like. And there are so many things that, from a risk perspective, I didn't think about them, but that turned to be a massive advantage. If I thought about things only from a risk perspective and the excitement wasn't there, probably success would not have happened.

Esther Whieldon: Tell us a little bit about the challenges the hydrogen faces in deployment as a low-carbon solution.

Enass Abo-Hamed: Hydrogen is a difficult molecule. So today, it's expensive to generate, difficult to store and hard to find a buyer that is happy with the cost of it despite its potential. The hydrogen that you generate through renewables is green hydrogen, and it is highly dependent on the cost of the electron, and it is highly dependent on the cost of a generation technology, which is electrolyzers. That technology has not been scaled or benefited from going down the cost curve.

There is a normal path for any emerging industry to go to. It starts expensive and the more demand you have, you go down through the economics curve. And subsidies help, government stepping in to take the difference between what the supplier want to sell at and the buyer want to buy at helps a lot as well.

Esther Whieldon: If someone listening to this once to get a project started or wants to go down the same path you did, what advice would you give them?

Enass Abo-Hamed: I would definitely encourage them to first find a problem that they feel capable of solving and go after it. The reason why I'm saying that is when you have some form of a passion, you take a lot of challenges and have the ability to embrace them, and that passion will actually fuel your journey. The way the world has evolved in supporting women in my opinion, in the past 10 years is quite encouraging. It was harder 10 years ago to start a hydrogen business because there wasn't a hydrogen market.

There were not many funds that wanted to fund hydrogen. There were not many customers that wanted to buy hydrogen. There were not many governments that had hydrogen strategies or regulatory frameworks that are even in place or being worked on. 

But I also want to say, although this is not the question that you asked me, it's not only up to women to go after their passion or recognize what is it that they want to do and do it. A lot of work needs to be done in the world around that to enable and facilitate growth and success.

We keep talking about like women in energy or women in the field thinking that it's only up to the women and their decision and choices. It's only half of the equation. The other half is actually, if we're talking about women in energy, the world of energy has to change to absorb more women, to absorb more solutions, more technologies that needs to be grown.

I had a very difficult journey, and I only share that because I like to show that difficult does not stop you, but I also had a lot of support and that support made all the difference to going through difficulty and grow with it. And to any woman who have a great idea and a great drive, let's say, you'll experience challenges and difficulties, but you'll find support.

And if there are changes that we need to make it's how much support do we put on the table for women who have the drive and the ideas to go after them, because the end result will be that we'll do something that we will all benefit from as an improvement. And achieving net zero is a very big project that needs a lot of contribution. So we really need to create space with that contribution.

Esther Whieldon: Great. Well, was there anything we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention?

Enass Abo-Hamed: I think we touched on these. You don't want to talk too much about challenges because of who wants to hear it, you don't want to discourage them. It's been a hell of a journey for me.

Esther Whieldon: No, I get it. So give me a 30-second description of some of the challenges you faced.

Enass Abo-Hamed: Fundraising. So over the past 10 years was always the statistics was always the numbers did not make any sense of how much VC money goes into funding women. businesses that were started and run by women. But in the past year, that number had even dropped. So I think it was 3%, and it dropped to 2.5% or something like that.

I think we don't do enough on that front and growing businesses and scaling businesses is impossible without capital. And that market is very tightly designed to exclude women. And when there's a difficult project that women bring to the table, I think the belief in their capability of execution is not as high as if it's betting on a male with the same idea.

Esther Whieldon: Did you have someone say that to you once?

Enass Abo-Hamed: Many times, but maybe like indirectly. I did face a lot of setbacks when it comes to fundraising, and it's always for a different reason. Unfortunately, even the funds that were either run by women or there was a woman involved in the process, it did not make a huge difference.

Esther Whieldon: Do you think that's the VC world in particular, that's the challenge there?

Enass Abo-Hamed: Because I think I made a lot of progress on every other front, but the fundraising front, in particular, was the front that has never really like succeeded to raise enough money to scale as fast as I could scale I think because of the evidence that I produced based on how strong the technology was and the product was.

Esther Whieldon: So as you can hear, Enass has faced some challenges in getting funding through private equity venture capital. One thing she said really stood out to me though, which I think is an important point, it's that we can't just make it the responsibility of the women to persevere as entrepreneurs. Rather, she said the world of energy needs to make room for more solutions and allow for more innovation. Now, Lindsey, you participated in a panel discussion at CERAWeek about new research you co-authored on gender diversity. Can you tell us about that?

Lindsey Hall: That's right. So for International Women's Day, March 8th, we published research using S&P Global Sustainable1 data to look at the pace of change in getting women in corporate leadership roles or actually, I should say, the lack of change. I'm honestly getting a little fed up with year after year having the same conversation on International Women's Day.

The data shows us the pace of progress towards gender parity is so slow. So the title of this research was "Women in Leadership, What's the Holdup?" And that was also the title of this panel at CERAWeek.

Esther Whieldon: So how was the turnout for that panel?

Lindsey Hall: So this is my first time at CERAWeek, and I didn't know really what to expect, but I am so encouraged to find a full room and a very engaged audience, almost entirely women, I should note. And they showed up eager to talk about their experiences and hear about what our data shows too. We'll include a link to the research in our share notes.

Esther Whieldon: There was also a Women in Energy dinner during CERAWeek that included a fantastic panel discussion of women leaders from the energy space. One of them, Dr. Amani Abou-Zeid, is the Commissioner for Infrastructure and Energy of the African Union Commission. That was someone I interviewed at CERAWeek last year and we'll include a link to that episode in our show notes.

Lindsey Hall: And the moderator for that discussion, Martina Cheung, is President of S&P Global Ratings. She's going to be on an upcoming episode of this podcast for our Women in Leadership series. And that brings me back to my interview with Jennifer, the CEO at LanzaTech. She's spoke on a panel at CERAWeek about women leaders in clean tech, and I wanted to know more about her personal experience. What was her path to the top, as you'll hear Esther, some of what she describes jives with what we just heard from your interview with Enass.

Jennifer Holmgren: My background is I'm a chemist that spend all of my career scaling new technologies. I used to work for UOP. I found that UOP's renewable energy business. So I was the one that took waste oil stats and greases. And this cooking oil and converted it to these that converted it to sustainable aviation fuel. I was actually the first person -- my group, not me personally — was the first to do that, to make sustainable aviation fuel.

But at that time, I used to worry a lot about where the feedstock was going to come from. I know that used fats, oils, greases could contribute, and it's not 100 million barrels of it per day equivalent, right? And then I get introduced to this company by Khosla, Vinod Khosla who was its largest investor. And I have done Fischer-Tropsch for what it's worth, catalysis when I was a grad student. Fischer-Tropsch, FT people call it, it's taking CO and hydrogen, carbon monoxide and hydrogen and converting it to products.

And I have done that for my PhD. And I remember at the time, understanding that these gases could be done everywhere and be made from everything. And so I thought to a well, geez, if this biological process that I don't understand because I'm not a biologist, can be scaled, that's something that can scale to the level of today's petrochem industry. And so I thought, well, okay, I'm getting ready to retire. I have nothing to lose. And if this works, it matters. And so I went ahead and said, "Okay, I'll do it. I'll help you scale."

And we did. We've got commercial plants running. And it's what I love to do is put steel on the ground, right? Make things really big. And I know that doesn't sound like a girl job, but it is because there's lots of other women that are chemical engineers, chemists and people that scan these things. Yes, that's how I got here.

And I absolutely love it, and I think that the ability to do something new requires collaboration in a way that I think women are very well suited to. I think I really believe that doing things that are disruptive require you to listen more, and require you to partner more, and require you to have a lower sense of self and a higher sense of team. And I think those are attributes where women really excel. And so I would argue we're very well suited for this.

Lindsey Hall: Well, I love that. And thank you for sharing. Is there anything in our last minute here that you think our listeners should understand about that transition from -- I'm picturing you in the lab, but at some point, you transition from the lab to the C-suite. And so what was that like? And were there challenges along the way?

Jennifer Holmgren: Well, yes, I'm old enough that there were lots of challenges. From the first time I told somebody that I wanted to be a chemical engineer, and he literally laughed at me, until today. But I think the only comment that I would make is don't carry any baggage with you. Laugh it off because baggage slows you down, and we're not on a journey where you can afford to be slowed down. So whatever you hear, whatever they say, learn from it that day, put it on the shelf at night, and move on.

Lindsey Hall: That's great advice. Well, thank you, Jennifer, so much for sitting down with me. This is a pleasure.

Jennifer Holmgren: Thank you. It's so good to meet you. Thank you, Lindsey.

Lindsey Hall: Esther, I wish I had more time to dig into Jennifer's story. But as you know, schedules are pretty tight during CERAWeek. I thought about what she told me though, for the rest of the week, but the importance of pursuing what you're passionate about, the role of listening and collaboration. And I kept coming back to this idea of taking the critics and putting them on a shelf. She said, don't hold on to baggage because it will only slow you down. And I thought that was a pretty powerful advice.

Esther Whieldon: Yes. It's definitely a good one to keep in mind. Now we'll be hearing from more women leaders in the coming months, and we'll be back next week with a breakdown of more key themes from CERAWeek. So please stay tuned.

Lindsey Hall: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ESG Insider. If you like what you heard today, please subscribe, share and leave us a review wherever you get your podcast.

Esther Whieldon: And a special thanks to our agency partner, The 199. See you next time.

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